Thanks Harold. Been looking forward to this going up and will be checking back often over the next few months. Early observation: no love for School of Seven Bells so far. I know it released early in the year but I'm sad to see it be overlooked thus far.

or for 2 lots of siblings in same band Dessner & Devendorf siblings from The National.

Yes, yes, there have been lots of siblings in bands or groups together. No need to clutter this thread enumerating all of them. Obviously my question was about siblings recording as individual artists, as Nick notes above.

On a more morbid note, I can't remember the last time there was even one artist in a high EOY position who was deceased at the time. Now we're going to have three (Bowie, Cohen, and ATCQ's Phife Dawg).

Most unexpected potential bubbler: Ariana Grande's Dangerous Woman. I did actually listen to the album when it came out, and aside from two or three songs, I found it rather pedestrian. Am I missing something?

McJagger wrote:Who would have guessed that A Tribe Called Quest would release a more acclaimed hip hop album than Kanye West in 2016?

Well, the jury will be out on that one until this is over. Right now the margin between the two is razor-thin, and I would expect both albums to continue to be major players on lists from all over the world. I'm just glad that We Got It from Here... was released in time to make all of these lists.

I'll post an updated spreadsheet before the week is out (maybe sooner), but I wanted to just give a quick update on the chart's upper reaches.

The top 20 albums are still the same as in my previous text update above, with only the order slightly changing. However, Sturgill Simpson is close to dropping out of the top 20, to be replaced by Jenny Hval - Blood Bitch has really been surging these last few days.

To my surprise, Blonde is mounting a very strong challenge to Lemonade for the #2 spot - as of this writing, only one point separates the two.

Kanye West (apparently our President-elect's new best friend, WTF - sorry, just wanted to mention that - any actual discussion of this bizarre topic should be taken to a different thread, thanks) has overtaken A Tribe Called Quest and Pablo-d his way into the top 10.

Further down, Anna Meredith's Varmints is one high ranking away from the top 40. I know nothing about this album, but it looks like I'm going to be checking it out soon.

Happily surprised to hear Varmints may scrape through. It's a wonderful little album that continiually bounces between playful instrumentals and succinct vocal tracks.

However it is disappointing to hear that Sturgill Simpson's newest album is losing ground. It's a bizzare reversal of two years ago when Metamodern Sounds in Country Music gained increasing traction as the EoY's were posted, leaving some of us wondering who this new usurper was.

One thing that's really surprised me over the last couple of years is this trend towards solo artists as opposed to bands or duos in the upper echelon of the album's EOY lists. As a review, this is the number of albums in the top 20 albums of the year that were created by a band/duo.

I tended to be pretty loose with what a band was though. I counted Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, D'Angelo and The Vanguard, and the first Bon Iver album all as "bands". Still though. Incredible drop off after 2013. Is this a coincidence or a trend with some clear reasons behind it?

I'm rather satisfied with the ranking so far. Well, not completely, but enough. The only point that really bugs me is Kanye ahead of Chance and the Tribe. The latter two are better hip-hop albums in my opinion than Pablo. I also think that Radiohead is too high, but I've been thinking that for all albums they released since Kid A, so I've grown accustomed to it. And I think that the Knowles sisters albums are better modern r'n'b albums than Frank Ocean's, but I like Frank enough to not care much.

Interesting to see the ROW score of Nick Cave compared to his US and UK scores; we can really talk about a gap here. I like my ROW

Radiohead has it too easy. I've grown slightly more positive toward the album lately, but it's still hardly deserving of the amount of acclaim it has attained. Wouldn't mind them dropping to the bottom top 10 and Bon Iver leaving it. Chance and Tribe just made superior albums. Would like to see Solange climb to the #2 spot (would like to see her at #1, but Bowie seems to stick to it). Surprised to see Nick Cave sticking to his placement considering how uneven his representation on the EOY-lists, not that I complain, though. Also Parquet Courts: no reason for it not to be higher. It was smart, catchy, mature, versatile, and deeply felt. Should be top 20.

How opinions can differ For me AMSP is Radioheads best since Kid A - rich detailed and beautiful, but I feel like many magazines has just decided that RH doesnt belong to the top spot anymore, just safe 5-10th place because you cant compare different genres anyway.Still, playing I need you from Skeleton Tree after Daydreaming, and it feels like amateur's hour, I cant stop that basically everyone is putting it on the same level with so many evaluating it even higher.But whatever results its great and very interesting to have such an annual review.

Are the albums spreadsheets from multiple years able to be cross-referenced to determine position on the AM list? That is to say, on the 2015 albums spreadsheet, "To Pimp a Butterfly" is at 509 points and "Carrie & Lowell" is at 392 points. When the AM update comes, "Butterfly..." will be at #100 on the all time list, while "Carrie & Lowell" will be at around #160. As it stands now, "Blackstar" is at 488 points on the 2016 albums spreadsheet. If nothing changes, can we expect the album's 488 points to land it somewhere between the #100 spot and the roughly #160 spot that Sufjan's album will have? Or do different spreadsheets use different means to assign points?

weirdfish wrote:How opinions can differ For me AMSP is Radioheads best since Kid A - rich detailed and beautiful, but I feel like many magazines has just decided that RH doesnt belong to the top spot anymore, just safe 5-10th place because you cant compare different genres anyway.Still, playing I need you from Skeleton Tree after Daydreaming, and it feels like amateur's hour, I cant stop that basically everyone is putting it on the same level with so many evaluating it even higher.But whatever results its great and very interesting to have such an annual review.

Well, it's indeed the total opposite of my view To me, A Moon Shaped Pool features some magnificent songs in "Burn the Witch" and "Daydreaming", a couple other great ones like "Identikit", but otherwise the rest of the album is a real letdown. Overall, I think it's barely above Hail to the Thief. I personally think that Radiohead's best post-Kid A release remains In Rainbows or I Might Be Wrong. As I mentioned elsewhere already, I'll confess that I'm not a Radiohead fan, but I don't believe I'm being excessively mean either: one of my cousins who isn't particularly fond of the band either outright called the album "mediocre"! I think he's too hard: to me it's a good album with great points, but it's not in my top 10 of the year. It would probably make my top 20 I guess.

On the contrary, Skeleton Tree is to me the definition of a masterpiece: although Nick Cave confessed that he started recording the album before the death of his son, it still works as a strong catharsis to his grief. When I first listened to the album it was a shocker how powerful his heartbroken performance was, and it was actually difficult for me coming back to it because of how voyeuristic I feel everytime I give it a spin - it's just too damn personal. The subtlety and minimalism of the music is just perfect: it underscores perfectly the beauty of the melodies and doesn't steal the show from Cave's singing, which magnificently displays his distress and I'm far more touched by it than by Thom Yorke's over-the-top miserabilism which has always come out to me as forced and theatrical (once again, I'm not a Radiohead fan).

In danger of stigmatizing myself as 'that guy who doesn't like radiohead', I must confess I have always have a strained relationship to Thom Yorke. I find his lyricism tiresome, overly introvert, anxiously humorless, not particularly articulate either. When I parse the lyrics for OK Computer, as an example, I find that he thrives in dislocation and alienation, but also that (almost obviously) this particular orientation makes it difficult for him to express himself in a way that feels solidary to the particular listener. Not the least because he's so humorless. He seems like he writes within this bubble of estrangement, but never takes a reflected glance at what he observes about himself or the world. As such, his observations about his broken relationship on AMSP doesn't give much, in my opinion. Wether he pities himself or looks toward stepping out of the cave and start afresh, It's purely self-observing, addressing emotional states, not really reflective hereof. This doesn't mean there's no quality to it. I do think it's a nuanced album, production-wise, but in this regard it seems more generous on a conceptual level (when I try to interpret the choices of arrangement and production) than on a spontaneous, affectional level. And if music doesn't affect me, rather than just poke my 'intellectual curiosity', for all its worth, it doesn't stand a good chance at my swearing allegiance to it in the long run. I blame Yorke. Not my idea of a brooding genius, though brooding indeed he is. (This is subjective of course, I'm not claiming my reading of them and him as being anything else than a personal reading.)

Nick Cave is a strange figure for me in the sense that I don't know why I feel so dedicated to him. I don't think he made a truly great album until his double album opus from 2004, which on the other hand I do consider a work of sprawling genius, a sustained sonic energy boom, a joyful, excessively literary celebration of love, sex, art, life's humorous triumph over death. As soon as he embraced himself as this verbose, literary eccentric, I feel like he became an artist of considerable worth, non the least because he allows himself to be comical, to laugh at his own conception of himself. I don't read him as self-serious. This very fact is what enables him to make an album like Skeleton Tree, on which there's nothing to laugh about. I must defend it from being labelled as amateuristic, cause this simply isn't true, even though I suspect this interpretation is part of why half the EOY-lists deems it one of the best albums of the year while the rest leaves it out completely. I find it a coherent production depicting states of loss (more than grief specifically), and I think it repays listening both musically and lyrically (as if the two were different).

Nick wrote:One thing that's really surprised me over the last couple of years is this trend towards solo artists as opposed to bands or duos in the upper echelon of the album's EOY lists. As a review, this is the number of albums in the top 20 albums of the year that were created by a band/duo.

Ok I'll go with, while I wanted a return to the guitars of OK Computer, Radiohead gave me an album I didn't even know I wanted, full of warmth and accessible, but still with a hint of menace. I loved it, It's been my no.1 most of the year, though at least one other is battling with my affections now.

Nick wrote:One thing that's really surprised me over the last couple of years is this trend towards solo artists as opposed to bands or duos in the upper echelon of the album's EOY lists. As a review, this is the number of albums in the top 20 albums of the year that were created by a band/duo.

Like Pierre say in another thread, We moved from an 2000's era of rock (band) to an 2010's era of hiphop (solo artist). I think it's not more complicated.

I think at the end of this cycle we will see a top 10 of: Dark Twisted Fantasy, To Pimp a Butterfly, Blackstar, Good kid, m.A.A.d. city, Carrie and Lowell, Channel Orange, Let England Shake, Lemonade, Blonde, Modern Vampires of the City. 4 rock albums in the top 10 is the lowest since the 1950s, and I'm not sure that the last 3 years of the decade won't wittle away at that number.

The truth is, there just isn't that much innovation in Rock anymore. I remember when The Suburbs came out, how I viewed it in comparison to rock albums of the year from the 00s. It felt like a pleasant retread of Arcade Fire's strengths, with a couple of new tricks, but not an exciting, dynamic masterpiece.

Hi guys, I've been a reader for a long long time, and recently I've been trying to elaborate the same kind of EOY spreadsheet but for italian records. I'm sorry as probably you get asked this question a lot, but how does the spreadsheet work?

I've tried to look everywhere, and then I've tried to figure it out from the formulas, but a) couldn't find it and b) couldn't figure it out cause I'm not good enough with Excel lol.

I'd be grateful if someone could explain to me the parameters or direct me towards the explanation in case it was somewhere here and I have been blind Only thing that I would really like to understand is how does it work with lists of different lenghts... for example how much is a 1st place worth in a 100 positions list? Or how much is a 82nd place worth in a 90 position list, and so on.

Thank you for all the great work you do, this is really freaking amazing. You rock people

I survived. I speak, I breathe,I'm incompleteI'm alive - hooray!You're wrong again'Cause I feel no love

weirdfish wrote:How opinions can differ For me AMSP is Radioheads best since Kid A - rich detailed and beautiful, but I feel like many magazines has just decided that RH doesnt belong to the top spot anymore, just safe 5-10th place because you cant compare different genres anyway.Still, playing I need you from Skeleton Tree after Daydreaming, and it feels like amateur's hour, I cant stop that basically everyone is putting it on the same level with so many evaluating it even higher.But whatever results its great and very interesting to have such an annual review.

It's perfectly fine to prefer AMSP to Skeleton Tree or to not like Skeleton Tree at all (it's certainly not an album for everyone), but calling an artist who has released highly acclaimed albums in four different decades 'amateurish' is one of the silliest things I've heard on this forum in a long time. Maybe it was just a bad choice of words.

I'm glad Nick Cave is keeping his ranking in the top 10. It looks like Beyoncé's lead keeps crumbling, although I'm not a fan of the fact that Radiohead could potentially climb higher than her. I wish Solange (or even Cave) would instead, for example, if such a move was needed.

I also wish Chance would regain his place in the top 10 and get back ahead of Kanye.

I still think M83 have no business in the top 100 of this year. Quite surprised Underworld could potentially squeeze in a bubbler for the first time in years. I don't mind and I like the album of course, although it doesn't come close to the masterpieces of their heyday.

Funny to see that Christine and the Queens will place their album on the website two years after it was actually released for us in France. I wish La Femme would have as much luck, but I'm skeptical.

Harold wrote:As more Rest of the World lists start to appear, a couple of things worth noting:

As of today, not only has Blonde moved ahead of Lemonade - so has A Moon Shaped Pool. And if Skeleton Tree continues its stellar showing internationally, Beyonce could very well end up at #5.

I am surprised and delighted that the two best U.S. indie-rock albums of the year - Teens of Denial and Human Performance - are doing extremely well in international polls.

I don't really want to be complaining, but related to this I think not only that US lists could have a better balance between hip hop / R&B and other genres, but also that international lists could have a better balance between male and female artists.

Edit: Having said that, to each his own and that goes for critics too. Having said that though, some critics' lists look like compilation sources like AM.

Edit2: This is however not a comment against any of the particular albums Harold mentioned. Certainly not.

Everyone you meet fights a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.